CRAIG CONLEY (Prof. Oddfellow) is recognized by Encarta as “America’s most creative and diligent scholar of letters, words and punctuation.” He has been called a “language fanatic” by Page Six gossip columnist Cindy Adams, a “cult hero” by Publisher’s Weekly, and “a true Renaissance man of the modern era, diving headfirst into comprehensive, open-minded study of realms obscured or merely obscure” by Clint Marsh. An eccentric scholar, Conley’s ideas are often decades ahead of their time. He invented the concept of the “virtual pet” in 1980, fifteen years before the debut of the popular “Tamagotchi” in Japan. His virtual pet, actually a rare flower, still thrives and has reached an incomprehensible size. Conley’s website is OneLetterWords.com.

WANING GIBBOUS

The semicolon appears to be more than one-half but not fully illuminated by the reading lamp. The fraction of the semicolon's dot that is illuminated is decreasing, like the small villages in the English countryside. This semicolon appears before the Last Quarter Semicolon and before the Full Semicolon. The amount of the semicolon that we can see will grow smaller and smaller every day, like a ball of string.